“Uki!”

My eyes snapped open, and I felt my heart racing from the shock of someone yelling so loudly and so suddenly. Lifting my head and taking a look around to see who it was that basically scared the living daylights out of me, my eyes came to rest upon James. I narrowed my eyes in annoyance as he chuckled slightly and motioned to his face.

“Got a little, uh, drool on your face there,” he said with a snicker.

Groaning while simultaneously rolling my eyes, I wiped all the drool off my face with my hand and reached for a tissue from the tissue box sitting on my desk to wipe my hand off. Shaking my head and bringing a hand up to rub the sleep out of my eyes, I asked, “What time is it? When did you get home?”

“I just got home about twenty minutes ago,” he replied, walking towards my bed and plopping down right in the center. I swiveled my desk chair around so I was facing him and was met with the expression of curious scrutiny as he carefully examined my face. “Why are you so tired these days? I think this is the fifth time this week I’ve come home to you passed out, face first in one of your textbooks.”

I gave him a deadpanned look, slightly annoyed that he even had to ask me that. “Two words: Graduate. School.”

He laughed, flashing one of his brilliant, perfect smiles. “Success is 60% pain and 40% suffering after all. But look at it this way! The moment you graduate, you’ll literally be years ahead of your peers and will probably have your own law firm before you turn 23.”

I yawned, reaching for my lukewarm cup of coffee that was hot about an hour ago when I first brewed it and took a sip. Bringing the cup down, away from my face, I said, “Thanks for reminding me why I put myself through this hell on a daily basis.”

He gave me a lopsided grin and began talking about something that had happened today while he was in class, but I tuned him out pretty quickly. James Park, everybody, my best friend in the whole entire world. When we resumed the semester here at Cambridge, he and I decided to move in together so we wouldn’t be stuck with some psycho roommate neither of us wanted, and I can honestly say that sharing an apartment with this guy these past couple of months has been one of the greatest adventures I’ve experienced to date.  

While James kept talking, laughing about something stupid one of his fraternity brothers had done over the weekend, the dream that I was having right before he woke me up kept replaying through my mind. “I’ll never get over you, Uki…” I shook my head, trying to get the words out of my mind. It’s been almost four months since that conversation with Leeteuk up on the dorm roof that one, chilly night back in Seoul, and almost every night since then, I’ve had the same dream, the same stupid dream that always ended right when I took the elevator back down to the dorm. That night was the last time Leeteuk and I have spoken, and I’m hoping that he took my advice to heart and forgot about me so he could begin moving on with his life.

“Uki? You still there?”

I blinked a couple of times, my attention snapping back to reality. I gave James a small smile that didn’t quite touch my eyes and said, “Yeah, yeah. I’m just… I’m just really tired.”

I immediately noticed his eyes softening, a worried glimmer entering his smoldering dark eyes. “Are you sure? Did something happen with Donghae?”

“What, no!” I exclaimed in a shocked manner, my eyes widening slightly. I chuckled, amused that, that was his first thought as to why I was upset. “Donghae and I are fine. We Skyped earlier this morning, actually. He’s stressed out, but you know, what’s new?”

James rolled over so he was now lying on his stomach. He rested his chin on his interlocked fingers and gave me a quizzical look similar to that of a curious three-year-old. “If Donghae didn’t do anything, what’s wrong?”

“James, nothing is wr—”

“Oh, cut the crap, Uki,” he interrupted, rolling his eyes impatiently. “What kind of idiot do you take me for? I think I know my best friend well enough to know when she’s depressed about something.”

I brought my cup of coffee up to my lips, taking a small sip. I kept the cup in front of my mouth to cover the small smile that spread across my lips and looked at him over the rim of my coffee cup. “Oh? And what makes you say that you’re my best friend?”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “Ignoring that comment,” he continued flippantly, “come sit over here and tell oppa all about your troubles.”

I rolled my eyes, turned to set my coffee cup back on my computer desk, and crossed my legs in my computer chair, sitting up just a little straighter. “I’m… I’m not sure what’s wrong with me. It’s just lately, I can’t… I can’t get myself to focus on the here—and now. I just feel like physically, I’m here, in England, at Cambridge, going through the monotonous motions of classes and papers and homework, but mentally… Mentally, I’m stuck in the past, literally living the same damn day over and over again. Before, I thought, oh, it’s just because it’s the day Donghae proposed to me, but that’s not even the moment I keep replaying in my mind. Does any of this even make any sense to you?”

I looked over to James’s face and noticed that the left corner of his mouth was tugged in a pensive fashion while his brows were knit in what looked like confusion. “I mean, it makes sense,” he began slowly, tilting his head slightly and thinking about his next words carefully, “but I guess the question now is… What moment do you keep thinking about?”

I swallowed, taking a deep, shaky breath. I never told anybody about the conversation that took place between Leeteuk and me, not even Donghae or Siwon. After how long I’ve known Super Junior and after knowing how much I tend to over everyone around me because of my complicated love situations that always seem to arise, I’ve learned over the years to keep my mouth shut about things like this. I mean, it happened the same day I announced my engagement; I didn’t feel like any more exciting drama was necessary for anybody in the dorm.

Snapping myself out of my thoughts, I looked back to James to see him now sitting up in an upright position with his legs crossed, patiently waiting for me to answer him. I sighed again.

“Okay,” I began slowly, “I’ve never told anyone else about this, so you have to swear this stays between us, okay?”

“Uh-oh. I can already tell this is going to be problematic,” he replied, giving me a skeptical look.

“James, promise me. Promise me you won’t say anything to anybody,” I pleaded.

He sighed. “Fine, fine, I promise. Now what is this all about?”

Taking a deep breath, I shut my eyes and mentally prepared myself for the conversation that was about to take place. Opening them, my light green eyes met with James’s dark brown ones before I opened my mouth to speak. “So the day Donghae and I told everyone about our engagement, everyone was really supportive of us and really happy that we had fixed things. But later that night, like, late, late into the night, Leeteuk came and asked to talk to me…”

“Oh god,” James murmured to himself, chewing his lower lip in thought.

Ignoring him, I continued. “So we talked, and at first, I thought he was just upset at me because he was under the impression that Donghae and I had rushed into things without really thinking of the consequences, aka, how the ELFs would react, how things would end up between Donghae and me in the long run, etcetera, etcetera, and I was totally understanding of him. I mean, he’s the leader of Super Junior, it was only natural for him to worry, you know? And he had always been another older brother to me, so of course he’d be worried about me. But then as the conversation went on, he started to get really pissed at me, and then he just straight up told me that I had chosen the wrong guy when I said yes to Donghae.”

I paused to gauge James’s feelings towards what I was saying, but I couldn’t read his thoughtful expression. He nodded his head slightly, motioning with his hand for me to continue speaking, which I did.

“Well, things kind of escalated from there. Basically, everything just kind of blew up, and I had to be a coldhearted and completely shut the door on him once and for all. Needless to say, he and I haven’t really been on speaking terms for the past couple of months now.”

“Wait.” James sat up a little straighter, head tilted slightly and an extremely confused expression making way onto his face. “It’s been almost four months since your last visit. You mean to tell me you haven’t spoken to him in all that time?”

I shook my head. “Nope. I didn’t have time to be worrying about it. In between school and finals coming up, and not to mention trying to plan the wedding while being thousands of miles away from my fiancé, it wasn’t hard for me to block it out of my mind.”

“Uki, that’s literally the source of all your problems, you stupid,” James replied, rolling his eyes at my seeming incompetence. “It’s no wonder you’ve been hung up on this single moment all this time. You can’t just have that severe of a conversation with someone—a conversation that literally crushed all his dreams of ever being with you, mind you—and not talk to them afterwards. That’s just cruel. God, for someone who’s practically a genius, you sure are dumb.”

“James, it’s not like that,” I replied, pouting.

“Don’t you dare pout at me, Uki Seohae Choi,” he said, unfolding his long legs from underneath him and getting off my bed. “Now get on that phone and call him, you pabo.”

Before I could say anything else, he was already walking out my door, calling over his shoulder, “I’m hungry! What’s for dinner?”

I sat there for a moment, blinking in stupefied confusion. I sighed in frustration (mainly because deep, deep down, I knew he was right).

You know, for someone I love so much, I ing hate that kid sometimes.

~~~~              

There comes a day in a college student’s life where he or she lies awake in bed, staring at the ceiling, hands folded neatly over his or her stomach, contemplating life, the future, and everything standing in the way of the now and then. You could be thinking about anything. About whether or not your degree is the right degree for you, whether or not the path you’ve got planned for yourself is the right path for you to take, whether or not any of the daily stresses are even worth it in the end. And then add on the other stresses of life, such as a boyfriend or girlfriend, trouble at home, financial struggles, and you’ve got a whole night of dark, depressing thoughts.

Yeah, I’m sure you guys know the kind of nights I’m talking about, the nights that leave you lying awake in bed, breaking out in a cold sweat about the future while your heart races in your chest, feeling almost as though it were trying to break out of the confines of your chest.

Well, tonight was one of those nights for me.

I wasn’t so much worried about school, but more so by the daunting prospect of the wedding completely falling apart. What if we don’t get a florist in time? What if we get the wrong cake delivered on the day of? What if I never find the perfect wedding dress? Or even worse, what if I find the perfect wedding dress but then something goes horribly wrong and it falls in a wood chipper or something on the day of the wedding?

“Jesus Christ, I can’t ing do this,” I murmured quietly to myself.

Sitting up in bed, I shook my head slightly to clear all the jumbled thoughts out of my mind. The wedding wasn’t something I needed to worry about right at that very moment. A date hasn’t even been set yet, and here I was, sitting here worrying about something as trivial as messed up flowers. As of right now, figuring out what to do about mending things between Leeteuk and me was priority number one.

After thinking about our conversation all day, I realized that James was right. Until I found a way to fix things, that stupid dream of that stupid moment will continue to plague me for the rest of my days. But how do you even go about fixing something as serious as that? I mean, this wasn’t just some random guy who had a little crush on me. This was someone who, at some point in my life, I reciprocated feelings for, someone who I could have potentially seen something going somewhere with had it not been for things like the , impending military enlistment, and, of course, Donghae. This was someone who I not only shut the door on forever, but took it a step further and locked that door up with chains and padlocks and threw the key away on. How do you go from a conversation that was meant to crush someone’s hopes and dreams on a future relationship, to suddenly fixing things and reverting back to life as if none of that had ever happened?

You can’t…

I sighed again. This was just too complicated to think about.

I peeled the blanket away from my body and swung my legs over the side of my bed. Knowing I wasn’t going to be getting any sleep that night, I decided to distract my mind in a more productive way instead of wallowing in thoughts of self-pity and sadness. I headed over to my desk, sat down in my computer chair, switched my desk lamp on, and began immersing myself in the meaningless words of my criminal law and justice textbook, and slowly, very slowly, I felt thoughts of Leeteuk slowly drifting to the very back of my mind where I’d managed to keep them hidden all this time, in other words, slowly drifting right back to where they belonged.

hehe hi guys :)

Thanks for being so patient and supportive of me! As always, I can't even begin to put into words how much it means to me. You guys rock <3 

I know these past two chapters have been pretty boring, but with any story, the beginning is always the most boring because it needs to kind of set the stage for the rest of the plot, so just bear with me!

With that being said, however, I have absolutely no idea how this story is gonna go, so we'll cross that bridge when it gets here I guess haha